Miscellaneous Software Reviews

sQ
Amarra sQ, a DSP (Digital Signal Processing) engine, is designed to work with streaming services while bypassing Apple's Core Audio. sQ is for Apple OSX only and it costs $29.99. What it delivers is the ability to customize your music's EQ, employ various dither settings, and generally I found that it makes streaming services sound better. What more can you ask for?

Short & Sweet
As promised, I am here to talk about 2 other variations on the BACCH4Mac theme; using the included RME Babyface as DAC, and going USB out of the BACCh4Mac-housing Mac into my DAC. Please consider the review proper recommended since I will not be re-hashing the BACCH story.

I said that back in 2015 after my first experience listening to music processed through a BACCH 3D Sound processor (the BACCH-SP) at CES. Now that I've experienced BACCH in-barn, I would say that the BACCH4MAC 3D Audio Playback System is ground-breaking technology.

How would you like to be able to stream FLAC and AAC files from your NAS, play Internet radio stations, Rdio content, and YouTube videos all from the same app on your iPhone or iPad? How about using the same app to play music through your DLNA compatible network player? Well Creation has an app for you.

Correcting
Digital room correction. Or should we call it virtual room correction since we're not correcting the room, we're adapting the music's bits during playback to better suit the room. But in order to correct something, you first have to understand what, if anything, needs correcting. Of course you can perform room correction by ear and you very well may come away with a sound that suits your tastes. But to really understand what's going on with the sound in your room, you need to analyze. You need to abstract the musical information into forms that represent various aspects of sound. The Dirac Live Room Correction Suite not only shows you how your music looks, it also shows you how they feel it should look.

Fidelizer Pro 6.5 is the creation of an audiophile from Thailand by the name of Keetakawee Punpeng. Back in 2011, Keetakawee released freeware for Windows called Fidelizer that provided optimization for dedicated Windows computers working as music servers. His software was designed to improve the sound of music software playing on Windows 7 computers. The software was easy to use and did not make a permanent change to the operating system.

[Editor's Note: MQA remains as controversial, if not more so, than when this review was first published in May 2016. Seeing as there have been more words spent on MQA than any other hi-fi topic in the past few years, I thought this review, which is focused on listening, was worth bumping up to the present.]